With the birth of our Little One getting closer and closer, I thought it would be best to start packing our Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes earlier than we usually do.

So for the past couple weeks we have been doing lots of prep work to make packing 200 shoe boxes as easy as possible.

All year long we keep track of what we have bought by writing it on the white board.

We also put up a nice bulletin board design in the hallway to encourage others in our church to pack their own boxes.

Here are all our supplies that we have collected all year.

I had to buy 4 more storage boxes this year so I am confident that we have enough items for our boxes.

My grandmother makes these cute lap blankets for all our 2-4 year old boxes.

Next we have double bagged all the soap so it will be ready to go in boxes.

Our last prep is to set up all the boxes by putting tissue paper inside to make it more like a present.

I am so happy that we were able to get some boxes with fun colored lids this year.

Makes it easier to separate the boxes for boys and girls.

We have also double bagged a lot of candy (not pictured) and have cleaned out our room at the church.

We hope that you are getting your items ready to go in your shoe boxes. If you haven’t started yet please start now.

Check out www.samaritanspurse.org/occ to find out how you can pack a shoe box. You can even do one online.

We will be packing some of our boxes today. I hope to update the blog this weekend with our process.